World Building:

Want your fights to be more interesting than blank squares on a battle map? Look at Johnn’s Hazards of Combat series, starting with Types of Combat Hazards: Terrain.

Gaming Theory:

Sometimes you want to turn the dial to eleven, sometimes you want a system that better supports casual engagement. My group faces that issue– when we game on Friday nights, my wife is often exhausted from the work week and it’s nice to have strong systemic backup. Doyce looks under the hood in Min Maxing Fun and sparks a good discussion in comments.

I always love your roundups, Scott — thanks for doing this one! We read enough different stuff that I always find a ton of new material whenever you do one.

#2 Comment By kenmarable On September 11, 2009 @ 7:27 am

I’ve recently started working through the World building in 30 days. Although it’s written for fiction writers, everything seems quite applicable to RPGs (in fact, you can tell from some of the posts that the writer is conversant in D&D).

It’s a very thorough step-by-step guide for building rich, varied worlds rather than “Ice world”, “Swamp world” that have no variation at all.

#3 Comment By Tricen On September 11, 2009 @ 7:45 am

Seems d7 is down. Shame, I REALLY wanted to check out that “abstract combat systems” link.

#4 Comment By Scott Martin On September 11, 2009 @ 10:14 am

@Tricen – d7 was very slow, but just opened up for me a minute ago. Hope you’re able to reach it soon.

#5 Comment By d7 On September 11, 2009 @ 1:50 pm

Thanks for the link love!

Things should be better behaved right now on my site. I had just moved my blog to new hosting last night and there are clearly some performance issues to sort out, so thank you for the flood of gnomes to help me test out the new setup. 😉 I have some better caching in place that seems to have improved things immensely.

(If it goes down again I would dearly appreciate if someone on Twitter would direct message me @sevensideddie. :D)

#6 Comment By Kurt “Telas” Schneider On September 11, 2009 @ 2:11 pm

Interesting discussion at the MJ Harnish/Savage Worlds link. Thanks for that one!

#7 Comment By Swordgleam On September 12, 2009 @ 9:03 am

Thanks for the plug!

Interesting links, as always.

#8 Comment By AndreasDavour On September 13, 2009 @ 7:38 am

You feel like starting an argument, and sounding like an authentic old geezer?